Weekly Inspirations: October 30th, 2015

Here are the things that I think are worth reading and checking out this week:

Why No One Is Listening To Your Great Idea

The ugly truth is that great work isn’t enough. No one tells you this early in your career; It’s something you learn over time. Cream doesn’t automatically rise to the top, and we don’t live in a meritocracy. If you want your idea to be heard, you have to go the extra mile to ensure that it’s framed to resonate with the right audience. Sound like a lot of hard work? Of course it is. That’s why many people don’t make the effort, and their ideas fall flat. They assume that a great idea, once introduced into their organization, to a client, or to their audience, will naturally change the conversation. However, ideas are often the easy part. The hard work isn’t having the idea, it’s shaping your idea so that it can actually be adopted and acted upon.Read the article here.

When Everyone Is Doing Design Thinking, Is It Still a Competitive Advantage?

Design thinking has come a long way since Tim Brown wrote about it here in 2008. The most valuable company in the world places design at the center of everything it does. Designers are on the founding team of countless disruptive startups. Domains such as healthcare, education, and government have begun to prototype, iterate, and build more nimbly with a human-centered focus. Now that design thinking is everywhere, it’s tempting to simply declare it dead—to ordain something new in its place. It’s a methodology always in pursuit of unforeseen innovation, so reinventing itself might seem like the smart way forward. But in practice, design thinking is a set of tools that can grow old with us. In this new article Tim argues that in order to create sustained competitive advantage, businesses must be not just practitioners, but masters of the art.
Read the article here.

Nobody Cares How Hard You Work

As you sink into the couch, or slide onto the bar stool, at the end of an exhausting workday, it’s hard not to experience the warm glow of self-congratulation. After all, you put in the hours, cranked through the to-do list; you invested the effort, and got things done. Surely you’re entitled to a little smugness? Sorry, but at the risk of ruining that martini: maybe not. We chronically confuse the feeling of effort with the reality of results—and for anyone working in a creative field, that means the constant risk of frittering time and energy on busy work, instead of the work that counts.Read the article here.

10 Productivity Apps Every Freelancer Needs

In today’s digitally powered world, online tools abound that can address a great many of the typical freelancer’s productivity, workflow, organizational, and intellectual needs. A well-curated selection of apps, websites, and software provides additional arrows in your creative quiver—not to mention sanity. To help you refresh your workflow, this article curates 10 apps that have captured our attention.
Read the article here.

Failure Is Inevitable. What Matters Is How You Deal With It.

If you work long-arc projects, you probably know the frustration and pain of having a project fail to live up to expectations. After expending so much time, energy, and focus on something you care about, it can be devastating when it just doesn’t click. What you do next is very important. The story you tell yourself in those moments may define the next few years of your life and work.
Read the article here.

Netflix’s New Brand

The creative studio Gretel has published the fruits of a year-long collaboration with Netflix, building the company a whole new brand identity capable of operating on a global scale. Any random graphic designer who lands a Netflix job needs to be able to easily create on-brand visuals, and so what the Gretel team developed was a simple, flexible card system called “the Stack.” In any brand manifestation of Netflix, there are three core cards that you’ll see: The first is a photograph or video of a “character” (like Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood), the second is a splash of color (generally white or red), and the third is text of some sort (like a movie title or tagline). In aggregate, the three stacks become the Netflix brand.Read the article here.

Here are the things that I think are worth reading and checking out this week: How to Become More Self-Aware Alan Mulally,...

Stephen GatesNovember 17, 2017

Creative Director, Designer, Brand Builder, Speaker, Podcaster, Crazy One.
As a designer, I have 20+ years experience creating the strategy, concepts, and designs for award-winning integrated global advertising campaigns, building multiple global Fortune 500 brands and creating innovative digital experiences. As a leader, I have 15+ years transforming agency and client-side teams using a mix of creativity, business strategy, process and political skill to create innovative, world-class work and cultures that change industries and companies. My clients have included American Airlines, W Hotels, Disney, Citi, ExxonMobil, Acura, Old Navy, Nationwide Insurance, Verizon, Subaru and many others. My work has received over 150 international awards, my app designs have been named as one of the World’s 100 Greatest Apps, Apple has featured my work in 9 keynotes, 4 TV commercials and more.